NFL Playoffs: Wild Card Picks

Happy New Year from Cade and me! It’s been an excellent year personally and professionally for both of us. We made improvements to our NFL model and had our best regular season yet, and we recovered from a dreadful start to finish above .500 in our first year of college football picks (with an excellent record on our biggest plays). We’ve also expanded our media presence beyond the Wall Street Journal, providing picks and video segments weekly for The Sporting News’ betting site, The Linemakers, and making multiple appearances on the “Betting Dork” podcast. Thank you all so much for visiting the site and for all the great feedback you’ve given us. On to 2014!

We ended the regular season on a tear, winning all four of our official plays last weekend, but losing three of our four Break-Even or Better selections. With that, we finish the regular season 50-29-1 (63.3%) on official plays.

As of now (1:45am EST on Wednesday night) none of the wild card playoff games qualify as “official plays”, but that could change depending on line moves.

Big Plays (17-9-1 YTD)

no plays this week

Other Plays (33-20 YTD)

no plays this week

Break-Even or Better (16-16-1 YTD)

Kansas City +2.5 at Indianapolis [MP Line: KC -0.5]

San Diego +7 at Cincinnati [MP Line: SD +6.0]

Green Bay +3 -120 vs. San Francisco [MP Line: GB -0.1]

In the remaining game, we think New Orleans should be favored by 0.3 points over Philadelphia. New Orleans narrowly misses the threshold for a break-even play at the current market line of +2.5.

We have a few games that could become “official plays” if the line moves just a bit. New Orleans and Green Bay both become Other Plays at a line of a flat +3. Kansas City becomes an Other Play at +3 -120, and becomes a Big Play at a flat +3.

Rufus Peabody is a sports analyst and professional sports bettor, currently traveling the world on Remote Year. He is a 2008 graduate of Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on inefficiencies in the baseball betting market. Mr. Peabody was previously ESPN's 'predictive analytics expert' and many, many years ago got his start in the industry working as a statistical analyst for Las Vegas Sports Consultants.